The Modern Library: the 200 best novels in English since 1950

202 Works 1,081,407 Books 19,905 Reviews ½ 3.9
Based on the book by Carmen Callil and Colm Tóibín, published by Picador (1999). See the list of books on the Clare County Library's website. This list is not associated with the publisher show more Modern Library.

The list has 202 items; Callil and Tóibín could not agree on the best work of V.S. Naipaul, and of Saul Bellow, so each of their choices was included for those two authors. In addition the first edition stopped short of 200 (at 194) and invited readers to send in suggestions for the final six; these were included in subsequent editions. These six are annotated on their listing below.
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Year Awarded:
1999
WorkOrder Label
A Murder Is Announced (1950) by Agatha Christie
1950
Nothing (1950) by Henry Green
1950
Power Without Glory (1950) by Frank Hardy
1950
The Grand Sophy (1950) by Georgette Heyer
1950
December Bride (1951) by Sam Hanna Bell
1951
My Cousin Rachel (1951) by Daphne Du Maurier
1951
The West Pier (1953) by Patrick Hamilton
1951
The Ballad of the Sad Café and Other Stories (1943) by Carson McCullers
1951
A Dance to the Music of Time: First Movement, Spring (1962) by Anthony Powell
1951–75
1951
The Catcher in the Rye (1951) by J. D. Salinger
1951
Invisible Man (1952) by Ralph Ellison
1952
The Old Man and the Sea (1950) by Ernest Hemingway
1952
The Natural (1952) by Bernard Malamud
1952
The Financial Expert (1953) by R. K. Narayan
1952
Wise Blood (1952) by Flannery O'Connor
1952
East of Eden (1952) by John Steinbeck
1952
The Sword of Honour Trilogy (1952) by Evelyn Waugh
1952–61
1952
Private Life of an Indian Prince (1953) by Mulk Raj Anand
1953
Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953) by James Baldwin
1953
The Adventures of Augie March (1953) by Saul Bellow
1953
The Long Goodbye (1953) by Raymond Chandler
1953
The Go-Between (1953) by L. P. Hartley
1953
The Echoing Grove (1953) by Rosamond Lehmann
1953
The Palm-Wine Drinkard and his Dead Palm-Wine Tapster in the Deads' Town (1952) by Amos Tutuola
1953
Lucky Jim (1954) by Kingsley Amis
1954
Lord of the Flies (1954) by William Golding
1954
The Tortoise and the Hare (1954) by Elizabeth Jenkins
1954
The Flint Anchor (1954) by Sylvia Townsend Warner
1954
Three Novels: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable (1951) by Samuel Beckett
1955–58
1955
The Recognitions (1955) by William Gaddis
1955
The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955) by Patricia Highsmith
1955
Lolita (1955) by Vladimir Nabokov
1955
A Legacy (1956) by Sybille Bedford
1956
Train to Pakistan (1956) by Khushwant Singh
1956
Owls Do Cry (1957) by Janet Frame
1957
On the Road (1957) by Jack Kerouac
1957
Angel (1957) by Elizabeth Taylor
1957
The Fountain Overflows (1956) by Rebecca West
1957
Things Fall Apart (1958) by Chinua Achebe
1958
Babette's Feast and Other Anecdotes of Destiny (1958) by Isak Dinesen
1958
From the Terrace (1958) by John O'Hara
1958
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958) by Alan Sillitoe
1958
Naked Lunch (1962) by William S. Burroughs
1959
A Heritage and its History (1959) by Ivy Compton-Burnett
1959
The Little Disturbances of Man (1959) by Grace Paley
1959
To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) by Harper Lee
1960
The Balkan Trilogy (1960) by Olivia Manning
1960–65
1960
Rabbit Angstrom: A Tetralogy (1995) by John Updike
1960–90
1960
Jeeves in the Offing (1960) by P. G. Wodehouse
US: How Right You Are, Jeeves
1960
Catch-22 (1961) by Joseph Heller
1961
A House for Mr Biswas (1961) by V. S. Naipaul
1961
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961) by Muriel Spark
1961
Riders in the Chariot (1961) by Patrick White
1961
That's How It Was (1962) by Maureen Duffy
1962
The Reivers (1962) by William Faulkner
1962
The Golden Notebook (1962) by Doris Lessing
1962
Girl with Green Eyes (1962) by Edna O'Brien
The Lonely Girl, renamed Girl with Green Eyes 1964
1962
Ship of Fools (1962) by Katherine Anne Porter
1962
The Little Girls (1964) by Elizabeth Bowen
1963
The Spy Who Came in From the Cold (1963) by John le Carré
1963
The Group (1963) by Mary McCarthy
1963
The Bell Jar (1963) by Sylvia Plath
1963
Herzog (1964) by Saul Bellow
1964
Heartland (1964) by Wilson Harris
1964
Last Exit to Brooklyn (1964) by Hubert Selby Jr.
1964
Memoirs of a Peon (1965) by Frank Sargeson
1965
Interpreters (1965) by Wole Soyinka
1965
The Magus (1965) by John Fowles
3rd of 6 additions by the editors for the first paperback edition
1966
A Jest of God (1966) by Margaret Laurence
1966
Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) by Jean Rhys
1966
The Jewel in the Crown (1966) by Paul Scott
1966
Cotters' England (1966) by Christina Stead
US: Dark Places of the Heart 1967
1966
The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967) by William Styron
1967
A Grain of Wheat (1967) by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o
1967
In the Heart of the Heart of the Country & Other Stories (1968) by William H. Gass
1968
The Nice and the Good (1968) by Iris Murdoch
1968
The Unfortunates (1969) by B. S. Johnson
1969
Happiness and Other Stories (1969) by Mary Lavin
1969
The Godfather (1969) by Mario Puzo
1969
Fifth Business (1970) by Robertson Davies
1970
Master and Commander (1969) by Patrick O'Brian
1970
The Day of the Jackal (1971) by Frederick Forsyth
1971
St. Urbain's Horseman (1971) by Mordecai Richler
1971
Black List, Section H (1971) by Francis Stuart
1971
The Optimist's Daughter (1972) by Eudora Welty
1972
The Siege of Krishnapur (1973) by J. G. Farrell
1973
Gravity's Rainbow (1973) by Thomas Pynchon
1973
Ragtime: A Novel (1975) by E. L. Doctorow
1975
Heat and Dust (1975) by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
1975
Changing Places (1975) by David Lodge
1975
The Lost Salt Gift of Blood (1988) by Alistair MacLeod
1976
Interview with the Vampire (1976) by Anne Rice
1976
Saville (1976) by David Storey
1976
Injury Time (1977) by Beryl Bainbridge
1977
Falconer (1977) by John Cheever
1977
A Book of Common Prayer (1977) by Joan Didion
1977
The Ice Age (1977) by Margaret Drabble
1977
Tirra Lirra by the River (1978) by Jessica Anderson
1978
Plumb (1978) by Maurice Gee
1978
The Human Factor (1978) by Graham Greene
1978
The Murderer (1978) by Roy Heath
1978
The Cement Garden (1978) by Ian McEwan
1978
The Year of the French (1979) by Thomas Flanagan
1979
From the Fifteenth District (1979) by Mavis Gallant
1979
Burger's Daughter (1979) by Nadine Gordimer
1979
Sleepless Nights (1979) by Elizabeth Hardwick
1979
The Executioner's Song (1979) by Norman Mailer
1979
A Bend in the River (1979) by V. S. Naipaul
1979
Earthly Powers (1980) by Anthony Burgess
1980
The Transit of Venus (1980) by Shirley Hazzard
1980
Riddley Walker (1980) by Russell Hoban
1980
Lamb (1980) by Bernard MacLaverty
1980
So Long, See You Tomorrow (1979) by William Maxwell
5th of 6 additions by the editors for the first paperback edition
1980
Housekeeping (1980) by Marilynne Robinson
1980
A Confederacy of Dunces (1980) by John Kennedy Toole
1980
Puffball (1980) by Fay Weldon
1980
Lanark (1981) by Alasdair Gray
1981
Red Dragon (1981) by Thomas Harris
1981
Midnight's Children (1981) by Salman Rushdie
1981
A Flag for Sunrise (1981) by Robert Stone
1981
On the Black Hill (1982) by Bruce Chatwin
1982
Schindler's Ark (1982) by Thomas Keneally
US: Schindler's List
1982
The Color Purple (1982) by Alice Walker
1982
A Boy's Own Story (1982) by Edmund White
1982
Money: A Suicide Note (1984) by Martin Amis
1984
Empire of the Sun (1984) by J. G. Ballard
1984
Flaubert's Parrot (1984) by Julian Barnes
1984
In Custody (1984) by Anita Desai
1984
The Children's Bach (1984) by Helen Garner
6th of 6 additions by the editors for the first paperback edition
1984
Nation of Fools: Scenes from Indian Life (1984) by Balraj Khanna
1984
Machine Dreams (1984) by Jayne Anne Phillips
1984
Family and Friends (1985) by Anita Brookner
1985
Blood Meridian (1985) by Cormac McCarthy
1985
Lonesome Dove (1985) by Larry McMurtry
1985
Black Robe (1985) by Brian Moore
1985
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985) by Jeanette Winterson
1985
The Sportswriter (1986) by Richard Ford
1986
An Artist of the Floating World (1986) by Kazuo Ishiguro
1986
A Summons to Memphis (1986) by Peter Taylor
1986
A Dark-Adapted Eye (1986) by Barbara Vine
1986
Ellen Foster (1987) by Kaye Gibbons
1987
Double Whammy (1987) by Carl Hiaasen
1987
Misery (1987) by Stephen King
1987
Beloved (1987) by Toni Morrison
1987
In the Skin of a Lion (1987) by Michael Ondaatje
1987
The Other Garden (1987) by Francis Wyndham
1987
Oscar and Lucinda (1988) by Peter Carey
1988
Where I'm Calling From: New and Selected Stories (1988) by Raymond Carver
1988
Paris Trout (1988) by Pete Dexter
1988
The Sugar Mother (1988) by Elizabeth Jolley
1988
Forty-seventeen (1988) by Frank Moorhouse
1988
Cracking India (1988) by Bapsi Sidhwa
1988
Breathing Lessons (1988) by Anne Tyler
1988
The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987) by Tom Wolfe
1988
The Book of Evidence (1989) by John Banville
1989
The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love (1989) by Oscar Hijuelos
1989
The Joy Luck Club (1989) by Amy Tan
1989
Possession (1990) by A.S. Byatt
1990
Age of Iron (1990) by J. M. Coetzee
1990
A Home at the End of the World (1990) by Michael Cunningham
1990
The Snapper (1990) by Roddy Doyle
1990
Get Shorty (1990) by Elmore Leonard
1990
The Great World (1990) by David Malouf
1990
Amongst Women (1990) by John McGahern
1990
Friend of My Youth: Stories (1990) by Alice Munro
1990
The Regeneration Trilogy (1991) by Pat Barker
1991–95
1991
Wise Children (1991) by Angela Carter
1991
A Strange and Sublime Address (1991) by Amit Chaudhuri
1991
American Psycho (1991) by Bret Easton Ellis
1991
The Redundancy of Courage (1991) by Timothy Mo
1991
Mating (1991) by Norman Rush
1991
Downriver (1991) by Iain Sinclair
1991
A Thousand Acres (1991) by Jane Smiley
1991
Reading Turgenev (1991) by William Trevor
1991
Cloudstreet (1991) by Tim Winton
1991
Death and Nightingales (1992) by Eugene McCabe
1992
The Butcher Boy (1992) by Patrick McCabe
1992
The Secret History (1992) by Donna Tartt
1992
The Virgin Suicides (1993) by Jeffrey Eugenides
1993
Birdsong (1993) by Sebastian Faulks
1st of 6 additions by the editors for the first paperback edition
1993
A River Sutra (1993) by Gita Mehta
1993
The Shipping News (1993) by E. Annie Proulx
1993
My Idea of Fun (1993) by Will Self
1993
A Suitable Boy (1993) by Vikram Seth
4th of 6 additions by the editors for the first paperback edition
1993
Trainspotting (1993) by Irvine Welsh
1993
What a Carve Up! (1994) by Jonathan Coe
US: The Winshaw Legacy
1994
Captain Corelli's Mandolin (1993) by Louis De Bernières
US: Corelli's Mandolin
1994
The Folding Star (1994) by Alan Hollinghurst
1994
Original Sin (1994) by P. D. James
1994
How Late It Was, How Late (1994) by James Kelman
1994
The Tortilla Curtain (1995) by T. Coraghessan Boyle
1995
The Blue Flower (1995) by Penelope Fitzgerald
1995
A Fine Balance (1995) by Rohinton Mistry
1995
Alias Grace (1996) by Margaret Atwood
1996
Asylum (1997) by Patrick McGrath
1996
Last Orders (1996) by Graham Swift
1996
The Night in Question: Stories (1996) by Tobias Wolff
1996
Quarantine (1997) by Jim Crace
1997
Underworld (1997) by Don DeLillo
1997
Cold Mountain (1997) by Charles Frazier
2nd of 6 additions by the editors for the first paperback edition
1997
American Pastoral (1997) by Philip Roth
1997
The Lady from Guatemala (1997) by V. S. Pritchett
1998

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